Caroline Norton

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Standard Name: Norton, Caroline
Birth Name: Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Sheridan
Pseudonym: A Young Lady of Distinction, aged eleven years
Married Name: Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton
Pseudonym: Pearce Stevenson, Esq.
Married Name: The Honourable Mrs Norton
Pseudonym: Aunt Carry
Pseudonym: Cxxxy
Pseudonym: Libertas
Publishing over forty years of the nineteenth century, professional woman of letters CN produced poetry and songs, four novels, stories, and a few unsuccessful plays. She edited annuals and periodicals, where she also published work of her own, including reviews. The circumstances of her life led her also to publish on the social-reform topics of child labour, divorce law, and married women's property, in pamphlets, letters to the Times, and well-researched monographs. Though she thought of herself as primarily a poet, her polemical writing is now her best-known, just as her contribution to reforming the laws for women in Victorian England has now overshadowed the scandal that dogged her in and beyond her lifetime.
Photograph of a painting of Caroline Norton by Sir George Hayter, 1832. She is seated at a desk with her chin resting pensively on her left hand while she pauses in writing with a quill pen in a large open book. Behind her is red drapery, a large column, and a nighttime scene. Her bare shoulders emerge from a white gauzy bodice with puffed, bound sleeves, gold trim at the neckline, and a gold mantle over it. She has gold bracelets on both her wrists; her black hair, parted in the middle, is coiled over her

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Marguerite Blessington edited the annual The Keepsake, in succession to F. M. Reynolds , Caroline Norton , and Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley .
Library catalogues all have the period of her editorship as 1841-1850.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Feldman, Paula R., editor. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. John Hopkins University Press.
150
Textual Production Ellen Wood
Some ten years after the novel's publication, Caroline Norton in a letter to the Times claimed EW had used one of her early stories as the basis of East Lynne.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(25 October 1871): 6
Textual Features Muriel Jaeger
MJ 's next chapter deals with the male counterparts of the previous chapter's examples (Frederic Lamb , but also Dugald Stewart and Henry Brougham ), setting the Society for the Suppression of Vice against...
Textual Features Eliza Lynn Linton
The protagonist, Phoebe, is only sixteen when she marries the twenty-year-old student Sherrard Barrington, who then goes abroad to earn money for their support, leaving her to live with her mother and their daughter. Phoebe...
Textual Features Mary Stott
Here MS writes grippingly of her own life, and illuminatingly about myriad subjects of public or cultural interest: the lives, customs, and deaths of newspapers, the conspiracy of silence about sex which had not dissipated...
Textual Features Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
The book's satire on parliament for its treatment of women was highly topical at a date two years after the new Divorce Act, three years after the Married Women's Property Committee was formed, and during...
Reception Isa Craig
IC 's poem was chosen from among six hundred entries; other contestants included the working-class poet Gerald Massey and diarist Arthur Munby . Caroline Norton , visiting Edinburgh that year, had also written a poetic...
Reception Charlotte Maria Tucker
CMT , whose works sold very well, was regarded as a major female author during the mid-Victorian period. She was incensed when in 1882 some one wrote a sketch of her life, and requested her...
Reception Eliza Cook
Reynolds's Miscellany printed an illustration of Lady Blessington , Eliza Cook , and Caroline Norton . Cook, in an open shirt and dark jacket, wears plainer and less feminine dress than the other two, whose...
Publishing Mary Russell Mitford
Caroline Norton 's Court Magazine printed a story by MRM .
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 144
politics Harriett Mozley
HM was one of those for whom religion and politics were hardly distinguishable. In 1832, during the time leading up to the Reform Bill, she sounds like a Tory in politics as she observes with...
politics Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
In her diary, Smith wrote that she hoped that Mill would take up the cause of women's rights.
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press.
18
She was also said to have been pointed in the direction of women's causes by the...
Occupation George Meredith
GM 's prolific career as a poet and novelist spanned four decades and established him as a important British literary figure. He published his first collection of poetry, Poems (1851), at his own expense. It...
Literary responses Ellen Wood
Early discussions of EW as a sensation writer often linked her writing to that of Mary Elizabeth Braddon , despite the two authors' vastly different styles and perspectives. In 1863 a review of Our Female...
Literary responses Eliza Cook
An 1848 preface to a US edition of her poems ranked EC 's popularity almost as high as that of Felicia Hemans or Caroline Norton . It characterises her work in terms of emotion and...

Timeline

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Texts

Norton, Caroline. Stuart of Dunleath. H. Colburn, 1851.
Norton, Caroline. The Child of the Islands. Chapman and Hall, 1845.
Norton, Caroline, and Robert Cruikshank. The Dandies’ Rout. J. Marshall, 1820.
Norton, Caroline. The Dream. H. Colburn, 1840.
Norton, Caroline, editor. The English Annual. E. Churton, 1834.
Reynolds, Frederic Mansel et al., editors. The Keepsake. Hurst, Chance; R. Jennings.
Norton, Caroline. The Lady of La Garaye. Macmillan, 1862.
Norton, Caroline. The Letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne. Editors Hoge, James O. and Clarke Olney, Ohio State University Press, 1974.
Norton, Caroline. The Separation of Mother and Child. Roake and Varty, 1838.
Norton, Caroline. “The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of ’Custody of Infants’ Considered”. The Mothers: Controversies of Motherhood, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta, Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994, pp. 1-58.
Norton, Caroline. The Sorrows of Rosalie. J. Ebers, 1829.
Norton, Caroline. The Undying One. H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830.
Norton, Caroline. The Wife; and, Woman’s Reward. Saunders and Otley, 1835.